“Chapstick was a totally selfish endeavor,” says Suppan. “I always wanted to have a bar to highlight women’s sports because there was no one even showing women’s sports. If you went to a sports bar, you had to beg to get them to put something on.”
The final time Condé Nast Traveler wrote about lesbian bars in 2024, we coated the prevailing narrative of their protracted decline. Then, American lesbian bars had dwindled to a small inventory of 21 institutions throughout the complete US, and had been struggling to maintain their doorways open amid the ballooning prices of operating small companies, the passage of anti-discrimination legal guidelines that opened up extra of the world to queer patrons, and, then, the world pandemic that closed a lot of the world for everybody. But over the previous two years, the LGBTQIA+ establishment has entered a special period: One by which 16 more bars have joined the ranks, from Dani’s Queer Bar in Boston to the Boyfriend Co-op in Brooklyn, and traditionally beloved spots like East Nashville’s Lipstick Lounge are usually not solely sustaining themselves, but in addition increasing into new territory.
Lesbian sports activities bars particularly have grown as a distinct segment, with venues persevering with to pop-up round the nation’s well-known LGBTQIA+ hubs. There’s the new Babe’s in Chicago; and each Athena Keke’s in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and Blazers in close by Williamsburg. The Sports Bra, which opened in Portland, Oregon, in 2022, has plans to expand to Boston, Las Vegas, St. Louis, and Indianapolis all through 2026 and 2027.
Nashville might seem an unlikely metropolis for an area like Chapstick. The foremost driver of the city’s billion-dollar party economy is downtown’s South of Broadway, or SoBro neighborhood: an notorious downtown hall that has solely grown honkier and tonkier in recent times with flashy new bars like Morgan Wallen’s This Bar & Tennessee Kitchen, a six-story, 30,000 square-foot temple to all issues bro, and Luke Combs’s Category 10, an omnibus of a bar that homes a honky tonk, a sports activities bar, a bourbon lounge, two full rooftop bars, and the largest dance flooring in the metropolis. The neighborhood’s cross streets stay ever-clogged with Ubers and commuters weaving by the stream of open-air celebration buses and pedal taverns ferrying day-drinking bachelorettes. Chapstick, a little bit underneath quarter-hour away from the coronary heart of SoBro, feels a world away from the downtown rowdiness that earned the metropolis its “NashVegas” moniker. It sits at a comfy residential nook of an artsy neighborhood not identified to the majority of vacationers; dogwoods develop between neighboring homes, with small rainbow flags hanging off their porches.